Apostles Of Learning

`Teachers` Offers Hope For The Educational System

September 01, 1989|By Kenneth R. Clark.

It`s enough to make a cynic weep. Just when-based on the barrage of gloom and doom he has seen on television-he has concluded that the world has gone to hell and no hope is left, along comes Arnold Shapiro with another of those remarkable documentaries about remarkable people who simply will not give up. This time, Shapiro (``Scared Straight,`` ``See Dick and Jane Lie, Cheat and Steal``) turns the spotlight on the American school system into which 135,000 kids bring guns to the classroom every day, in which more than 1,000 teachers are attacked by students every week, and from which 30 percent of students drop out every year.

In the midst of the mess, he finds teachers who, though paid less than beginning garbage collectors in 40 states, show what can be done with nothing more than imagination, innovation and sheer love of their students.

``The Truth About Teachers`` (6-7 p.m. Saturday, WMAQ-Ch. 5) profiles a half-dozen teachers from more than 1,000 interviewed-from the inner-city classroom to the hills of Appalachia. Their methods, wildly divergent from what one of them calls ``the 2-by-4 structure: two book covers and four walls,`` leave the toughest, most abused and disinterested kids ablaze with a desire for learning.

Two of these apostles are Bill Wilson, of Chicago`s Hubbard High School, and Jelena Morrison, of Proviso East High in Maywood. Wilson, who teaches choir, music and dance, is the Bob Fosse of the classroom, mounting elaborate stage productions and infusing his charges with a love of music and dance.

To see tough potential gang members and drug dealers joyously singing a 16th Century madrigal is to see a miracle. Morrison teaches math with a musical ``rap`` beat. She gets the school`s potential dropouts and turns them into A students.

A science teacher, Joe Barainca of Salt Lake City, has built a space-flight simulator in which his students spend 24 hours a day on ``missions``

lasting up to seven days, during which they learn physics, math and biology as a hands-on experience.

In Rabun Gap, Ga., Eliot Wigginton`s 9th and 10th graders continue to publish the nationally famous Foxfire magazine, and in Boston, Karen Cahill serves as teacher, counselor and therapist for inner-city kids whose lives outside her classroom are of uncompromising despair. Given her paltry teacher`s pay, she has to moonlight as a waitress to make ends meet, but she isn`t about to find more lucrative work elsewhere because, as she puts it,

``Who would take my kids?``

If the public school system is turning out little more than dropouts, thugs and the functionally illiterate, it is only because the system lacks more of such teachers. As Whoopi Goldberg, who hosts the show, puts it, it is the nation`s teachers above all others in the audience who should be watching. `Crossfire` fire

Between the ideological poles of left and right, television just can`t win. For years, the conservative Washington-based watchdog group Accuracy in Media has lambasted all television news, and most of its reporters, as

``biased toward the left.`` Now comes AIM`s opposite member, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), with the complaint that New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, named by CNN to replace Tom Braden as Pat Buchanan`s debating foe on ``Crossfire,`` is a ``bogus`` liberal, all of which means that CNN is biased toward the right.

``It is an insult to the various progressive movements-peace, civil rights, labor, consumer rights, feminist, environment-that CNN has chosen someone with virtually no connection to their concerns,`` complains FAIR in a news release. ``FAIR has nothing against Mr. Kinsley. He is a witty observer of the political scene, a bonafide cynic. What he is not, however, is a partisan of the left.``

Randy Douthit, executive producer of ``Crossfire,`` disagreed.

``He`s a liberal as far as I`m concerned,`` Douthit he said. ``He has been filling in for three years and they never raised the issue before. He has never failed me in fighting off Buchanan.

``He doesn`t belong to any leftist groups. He won`t stand out in the streets with a sign, but he`s a good journalist and a fine sparring partner.``